What is Social Media?

Essentially, social media incorporates technologies and methods through which people can share content, personal opinions, swap different perspectives and discuss anything of interest.

Social Media is BIG and Giraffe Design predicts that this will become even bigger in 2012. Here's a quick guide to some of the key players in social media:

Facebook (social networking)

Facebook allows you to create a personal and business profile, then chat, discuss and share information with others such as friends and family. It also has a practical business advantage - allowing you to create a business 'page' where you can interact with your customers or those who share a common interest.

What Facebook allows you to do:

• Connect and engage with users and spread the word about your business
• Engage with lots of people organised by city, workplace, school, club or relationship so you can target a likely audience
• Look at friends of friends and start building your network
• Join a group that is related to your industry or create one
• Facebook ads appear in the margins of other user’s profile pages. Use them as a cost effective way to promote your own business, convey a precisely target message and raise brand awareness
• Make use of the tabs,  use the photo tab facilities to display a gallery of your own work or products. Suitable for everything from website home pages to shoes
• Create a next events tab to update colleagues, associates or clients as to meetings, social gatherings or local forthcoming events that might be useful to them

YouTube (Video)

YouTube is a website designed for sharing video. Millions of users around the world have created accounts on the site that allow them to upload videos that anyone can watch. Every minute of every day, more than 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

Key benefits and features:

• Create an account to share videos up to 15 minutes long with your family and friends or create clips that will be of interest to your clients
• Use the YouTube edit facility to create a movie with music and other features
• Restrict who views your videos with YouTube’s privacy option
• Search the archive for your favourite clips

Linkedin (social networking for professionals)

LinkedIn is the most popular business networking platform, giving professionals from organisations and businesses across the world the ability to connect, develop their sales and demonstrate their skills, services and products.

LinkedIn has similar functionality to Facebook - but is deemed to be more professional and businesslike.

With 135m users worldwide and 7m users in the United Kingdom alone, the business opportunities that LinkedIn provides are immense. When LinkedIn is used to its full potential, by posting regular status updates, contributing to groups and answering questions, these all help promote your profile, and ultimately it becomes a great sales and marketing tool for companies of all sizes.

Presence Apps (Twitter)

Twitter is a micro blogging and social media platform that can be utilised by anyone to write short messages (up to 140 characters long)! The messages can then be read, forwarded and replied to by other twitter users. You can also follow other users and see what they are tweeting about.

Why use Twitter:

Twitter is a great tool to generate exposure to your business, product or just to promote yourself. Messages you write are displayed on your twitter page and posted to all of your followers pages.

How I gain exposure?

It’s a quite simple system, all you have to do is create an account, input your details start tweeting and follow some other twitter users.

You will slowly gain followers as a result of inputting relevant information and following other users but remember not to spam or follow hundreds of other users in a short period as you might get locked out of the system.

The best features of twitter are that you can follow certain people in your field of specialism, and at the same time utilise it for research and getting an insight into the people that you are interested in.

Google+

Well it can be explained as a hybrid, a mix and match of Facebook and Twitter. In Google+ you don’t add friends you just follow people and they may or may not follow you back. This following type approach is determined by what Google have called circles, a genius way of managing who sees what you post.

When you join Google+ you are presented with four predefined circles which you can very easily rename, keep or add to. The default circles are friends, family, acquaintances and following. There is also an unnamed circle which you can just drag somebody into to create a new circle.

The +1 Button

Since the launch of +1 I’m sure you will have noticed the +1 button appearing beside each site in Google’s search results.

When you make a search in Google, the results now have the +1 button next to the results.  Next to each result it will show you who in your circles have +1′d that site too. So now your friends are becoming sources of trusted recommendations.

No longer will you have to guess which search results to click first, your friends will guide you because they’ve already been there and are recommending it for you.

If you don’t already have the +1 button on your site or blog you really should be thinking about how you’re going to get it on there.

Why do I need to think about social media?

At the end of the day it is up to you, it is your personal preference. However, using any or all of the above gives you massive potential to showcase yourself, your business or your products for FREE! It is not about plugging or advertising, it is much more subtle than that.

However, if you have given consideration to your marketing and communications strategy - then it is a 'no-brainer'. Social media is an exciting opportunity to profile the personality of your business and reach out to a much wider audience.

There is just one health warning though - if you are going to start the process - it WILL require the investment of your time. You will quickly lose 'followers' or 'fans' if you get boring or worse still - only intereact sporadically.

For further information about how social media can help your business call Giraffe Design on 01202 303224.